Washington (CNN) - While reaching out to supporters through one of the latest high-tech means, President Obama expanded his social media experience by holding a Google+ video chat room interview on Monday afternoon.

In an election year, it's probably not good politics to talk about what you look forward to doing after your time in the White House, but that's exactly what President Obama did when asked about the frustrations of living in the security bubble.

(CNN) - Former U.S. Sen. and Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum has a well-known Google problem.

For the uninitiated, if you Google Santorum's name, the first result you'll probably get is not his personal website but a fake definition of "santorum," a sexual byproduct that's a bit too graphic to talk about in detail here. (Of course, you can Google him and easily find out.)

With the eyes of the Republican political universe turning to Ames for this weekend's Iowa Straw Poll, searches for Bachmann in the state have surged since Sunday, according to a breakdown of state data on Google Insights for Search, which analyzes search trends on the site.FULL POST

(CNN) – A group of Republican legislators in South Carolina are launching an effort to draft New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie into the 2012 presidential race.

About a dozen lawmakers, led by state Reps. Kris Crawford and Phyllis Henderson, will hold a rally on the steps of the South Carolina state house next Wednesday to let Christie know he has supporters in the key early primary state.FULL POST

(CNN) - Executives from Google and Apple may get an old-fashioned grilling at Tuesday's Senate hearing on high-tech privacy.

Their session before the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology and the Law comes a few weeks after it was revealed that smartphones and tablets for both companies can track information about the whereabouts of their users and store that data.

Washington (CNN) - As Nikki Haley shot up the GOP ranks in 2010 on her way to capturing the South Carolina governorship, she was also among the most Googled political figures of the year.

And according to a new Google analysis of billions of terms pumped into the popular search engine, it turns out that Haley was actually the "fastest rising" political figure searched for on Google in 2010.FULL POST